Meg Guiseppi, Personal Branding Expert

Recognized for her personal branding and executive job search thought leadership, Meg has been featured and quoted in Forbes, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal's FINS, Inc.com, Fortune, CMO.com, PBS' Next Avenue, About.com, Examiner.com, and many other esteemed publications.

Meg Guiseppi is one of only a handful of career industry professionals worldwide to hold the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist, Reach Social Branding Analyst – LinkedIn Profile Strategist, and Certified Executive Resume Master credentials.

As the Founder and CEO of Executive Career Brand Meg helps c-level and senior-level executives define their brand, create brand-reinforcing career marketing communications - resume, biography, etc. - and build a solid online footprint to increase their credibility and visibility to recruiters, employers, and hiring decision makers.

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Meg's clients say her enthusiasm and passion for branding fired them up to succeed in today's executive job search and helped them Land a GREAT-FIT New Gig!™

Through her Executive Career Brand blog, Meg enthusiastically shares advice and trade secrets on personal branding, executive job search, social media, and online reputation management, gained through her 20+ years in the career industry.

Fast, Smart Personal Branding Hacks
Personal branding is no longer optional for job search because it helps you differentiate the unique value you offer your target employers, over and above your competition. Some personal branding strategies for job search take a lot of time to accomplish.

Free eBook for Smart Personal Branding with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the place to be, and be seen, when you're job-hunting, building your personal brand, and managing your career or business. Savvy job seekers are already there, leveraging all that the site has to offer – networking, blogging, researching, building brand evangelism ... and staying top-of-mind with people who can lead them to job opportunities.

Promote Your Personal Brand on #LinkedIn with Hashtags
Using hashtags on LinkedIn – and other social media – is a simple way to: promote your personal brand promise, draw people to you, motivate people to want to connect with you, and potentially influence people to help you meet your career goals. In other words, hashtags are used with keywords to make the keywords show up more easily in a search.

Guide to Personal Branding

Guide to Personal Branding
The term "personal branding" may be new to many, but the reality of personal branding is not new. It's always been with us. Before there was a name for it, people were assessing other people's reputation and promise of value before deciding whether to partner, hire, or do business with them.

To Succeed Today, Balance Personal Branding With Personal SEO
Both personal branding and personal SEO are critical pieces for successful job search in the digital age, and they go hand in hand. But many people don't know how to strike the right balance between them, as they write their personal marketing documents and online profiles – resume, biography, LinkedIn profile, etc.

Personal Branding While Unemployed
Few of us make it through our entire working lives without some period of unemployment. Consider yourself lucky if it's never happened to you. But don't think it never will.

What Is Personal Branding?

To Succeed Today, Balance Personal Branding With Personal SEO
Both personal branding and personal SEO are critical pieces for successful job search in the digital age, and they go hand in hand. But many people don't know how to strike the right balance between them, as they write their personal marketing documents and online profiles – resume, biography, LinkedIn profile, etc. Let's first look quickly at what these two components are, and how they impact job search:

What's So Important About Personal Branding?
Your personal brand is a vivid indication of the best you have to offer – the performance, contributions, and value your next employer can expect from you. The brand you communicate marks your career reputation and is in some respects a promise.

Branding Is Key to Future Employment
Maintaining your brand: branding is key to future employment. So says the 2010 Kelly Global Workforce Index, which surveyed approximately 134,000 people across 29 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Branding Hype and Myth vs. Reality
Personal branding has somewhat mainstreamed and is becoming more accepted in job search. But I still see too many job seekers confused about what branding actually is.

First Step: Define Your Personal Brand

The Secret of Personal Branding Success
In my practice working with senior-level executive job seekers to define their personal brand and create personal marketing materials to help them land, I find that many people have a hard time grasping what personal branding really is. In job search, personal branding is all about differentiating and communicating the unique value you offer your target employers over your competitors.

The Secret of Personal Branding Success
In my practice working with senior-level executive job seekers to define their personal brand and create personal marketing materials to help them land, I find that many people have a hard time grasping what personal branding really is.

Define Your Brand: 10-Step Personal Branding Worksheet
Your personal brand is more than the brand statement you use as your elevator pitch when you introduce yourself in real-life encounters or to market yourself in your paper, digital, and online career marketing communications (resume, bio, Linkedin profile, website, etc.). Your brand is your reputation.

How to Create Your Personal Brand Statement
Misconceptions abound about personal branding, and what actually goes into a brand statement. Your personal brand statement is not an anemic job description stringing together your functional areas of expertise. Instead, it represents your promise of value to your next employer, and it should generate chemistry.

Get Personal with Your Personal Branding Statement
With target employers in mind, your personal brand "positioning" statement should link your functional areas of expertise (hard skills) with key personal attributes, values, and passions (softer skills). The message should showcase your promise of value and position you as a good fit to meet those employers' current needs.

Personally Branded Resumes
This new kind of resume helps you focus on what makes you unique -- a resume "branded" specifically for you.

10 Tips for Stronger Resume Branding
You're suddenly facing a job search, so you rush right to your resume (if you can find it) to update it. But wait! You may not be ready to tackle your resume yet. If it's been several years since you revisited your resume, or if you're one of those lucky people who never needed a resume, you may not be aware of how much resumes have changed in the past several years.

Branding with Your Personal Brand Biography
If you're not familiar with a career biography, think of it as an article written about you in "third person," for use on a Website or where ever an article about you might appear. Your resume plus your career bio are the foundation for your career brand marketing and online presence, positioning your unique promise of value over your competition.

Branding with Structured Examples
A powerful job search strategy, story telling is a compelling way to draw people in and illustrate your unique promise of value in the marketplace. When you link your value proposition with your personal brand and frame it all around "career success stories", you make it easier for hiring decision makers to picture you in the job they're trying to fill.

Branding with Your Colors
Wait a minute. Do the colors associated with you and your personal brand really matter all that much? Companies and organizations choose signature colors to represent them, evoke emotion, and attract customers. You are the CEO of your own company of one - Brand You.

Branding with Your Email Signature
If you're in a job search, you're probably sending lots of emails, to all kinds of people. You carefully craft your email messages to capture the attention of hiring decision makers and make them want to interview you, but how do you sign the message? With just your name and maybe your phone number?

Personal Branding for New Grads
"I'm a New Grad. Do I Have a Personal Brand?" The short answer – YES! We all do. Everyone has a reputation they've developed over time. Over your work life and personal life, you've become known for being a certain kind of person, being driven by certain values and passions, and offering certain skill sets and strengths

Over 50? Is Personal Branding for Boomers, too?
Personal branding seems to belong to Gen-X and Gen-Y. They're talking about it, blogging about it, and using it more than Boomers. Does that mean that personal branding works best for them, and not so much for you, if you're a Boomer?

Building Personal Brand Content for Your Executive Job Search
Personal branding for job search is a method to differentiate the good-fit qualities and value you offer your target employers over those competing against you. By aligning your key areas of expertise, driving strengths, passions, and relevant personal attributes with your target employers current needs, your brand makes you stand out from the crowd.

The Holidays:'Tis the Season to Build Your Personal Brand
Many job seekers put aside all thoughts of job-hunting and planning a targeted strategy over the holidays. They kick back and relax for now, deciding to jump back in once things start happening again in January. After all, nobody lands a permanent, full-time job in November or December, right?

Build Your Personal Brand Using LinkedIn

3 LinkedIn Insider Personal Branding Success Secrets
I've been a LinkedIn member and professional LinkedIn Profile writer for close to 10 years. I've not only learned how to help my clients leverage LinkedIn for job search, but also how to use it to build my personal brand and business. In fact, most of my clients find me through LinkedIn. Running a successful job search is very similar to running a successful business, and LinkedIn is just as important to you (the job seeker) as it is to me (the business owner).

Build Your Personal Brand by Blogging on LinkedIn
Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate your subject matter expertise, and communicate something of your personality and good-fit qualities for the jobs you're seeking ... that is, your personal brand. But setting up and maintaining your own blog may not be a realistic endeavor for you. Fortunately, LinkedIn offers an excellent option to building your own brand: LinkedIn offers a long-form publishing (or blogging) platform known as LinkedIn Pulse.

Personal Branding Makes Your LinkedIn Summary Dazzle
Over the years, I've reviewed the LinkedIn profiles of many job seekers. A great percentage of those profiles have non-existent or severely anemic Summary sections, even though plenty of evidence supports the importance of a solid LinkedIn Summary.

Branding with Your LinkedIn Profile
You have a "brand" new resume aligning your unique set of qualifications with the needs of your well-researched target employers, and differentiating your value proposition (or personal brand) from your competitors in the job market. Don't stop there. A great resume is not enough any more to land your next great gig.

SEO-Friendly LinkedIn Headline
Most executive recruiters and hiring professionals at your target employers turn to the LinkedIn search engine first, when they're sourcing talent. You want to do everything you can to have these people land on your LinkedIn profile, and that's why focus on SEO ("search engine optimization") is essential.

Keep Your Personal Brand Top-of-Mind with LinkedIn Updates
One of the many benefits of using LinkedIn for job search is the ability to stay top-of-mind with your network - which should include employees at your target companies and recruiters, along with your various professional contacts. Posting relevant updates to your "Activity Feed" is a relatively quick and easy way to do this

Build Your Personal Brand Using Other Social Media

Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter in Minutes a Day
In my practice, I rarely come across executive job seekers who are actively leveraging Twitter to help them land jobs. The few who even have Twitter accounts put up a few tweets initially, and then let it go. Their Twitter stream stopped dead months or years ago. This doesn't look very good, and could be detrimental to them. A Twitter account that's collecting cobwebs says "I don't really know much or care to know about social media and the new world of work."

Building Your Brand with Guest Blogging
Blogging is one of the very best ways to build your visibility, credibility, and brand message online. Google and other search engines LOVE blogs because, by definition, they are loaded with relevant content and the key words people search to find related information.

Branding with a Photo in Your Online Profiles
Have you ever seen someone's photo and then met them, only to find that the photo was out of sync with who you saw? Your photo usually sits at the top of your online profiles or website "About" page. It will be the first thing on the web page to capture people's attention

Power Your Personal Brand with Google Alerts
Do you realize that when job-hunting you're in a sales and marketing campaign for your company of one – BRAND YOU INC.? Your mission is to pitch your value proposition to prospective employers and get them to choose you over your competition.

Branding by Making Comments on Blogs
Recruiters and hiring decision makers routinely search online for information about candidates they're assessing. If they can't find you online, you could be missing out on golden opportunities. The more on-brand, accurate results for you, the stronger your credibility as a candidate, the better your online identity looks, and the more information about you is easily accessible to them.

Leveraging Your Personal Brand

Stand Out: Personal Branding for Job Interview Success
Research, strategic planning, preparation and rehearsal for interviewing are more important than ever in today's job market. Many job seekers don't take the time, or don't know what they need to do, to outshine the competition.

Components of a Strong Online Personal Brand
Do you want to increase your chances to be found by recruiters and the employers you want to work for? What job seeker doesn't? The better your online reputation, the better you position yourself online, and the stronger your presence online, the more appealing you'll be to these people.

Measuring Your Online Brand
Do you know what kind of information people are finding out about you online? Do you care? Do you purposefully build your online presence to send the right message? Do you regularly self-Google? Do you know what that is?.

The 6 Keys to Online Executive Branding
Do you have a strategic plan in place to build a strong online footprint, so that recruiters and hiring authorities will find you online when they source and assess talent through Google, LinkedIn and other search engines?

7 Reasons to Be Original
You see a beautifully written, branded resume – or maybe a LinkedIn profile – of a job seeker with similar qualifications to yours, seeking the kind of job you want. It sounds a lot like you, and you don't have a lot of time, so you see no reason why you shouldn't use some of that good writing in your own resume or LinkedIn profile. Here are 7 reasons why borrowing content is a bad idea.

Maintain Your Brand

The 3 C's Test for Your Personal Brand
You've put in the effort to dig deep and identify your unique combination of skills, strengths, attributes, values, and passions that define your personal brand and promise of value. Now that you know what your brand is, does it pass the 3 Cs test? Does it exhibit the characteristics that all strong brands need, to keep it strong and working for you?

Branding with Thank You Notes
Old-fashioned good manners are surprisingly effective these days. If you're in a job search, or even contemplating one, here's a piece of advice to position yourself above your competition:

Refresh/Change Your Brand

Refreshing Your Personal Brand
What have you done for your personal brand lately? When was the last time you took stock of your accomplishments and contributions that strengthened and reinforced your brand reputation? Times being what they are, you never know when you'll need to track down and dust off your resume and other career marketing documents, and update them.